Offering fonts relevant to the user's chosen language - following UX/design meeting 2024-Sep-25

[Eyal Rozenberg]

Let me elaborate in a sentence on the importance, for
non-Western-language speakers, of bug 151122; and possibly try
convincing developers, UI/UX designers and even marketing people about
its significance.

In LibreOffice, we currently partition typefaces, like languages, into
three language-groups: Western, RTL-CTL, and CJK [1]. When you choose a
typeface, you only select from the typefaces associated with the
relevant written language groups. [2]

But - there are multiple languages in each group, using different
alphabets. So when you want to select a typeface for your language - you
are likely met with a long list of typefaces which _don't_ have the
glyphs for your language - and you can't use them. And this happens each
and every time. This is frustrating - especially since LO is aware of
the language you're using. [3]

So, the ongoing discussion is about how to arrange it for users to be
able to select a typeface from language Foo from the list of typefaces
which support Foo. This is actually an issue in multiple applications,
not just ours; this is also a chance to be trailblazers UI-wise, and
score a win over the alternative office suites as well (MSO, OnlyO etc.
- I don't think any of them handles this well, correct me if I'm wrong).

Note that this is relevant for the "Western" language group as well:
Think of a document involving both Bulgarian and Turkish. Many typefaces
designed for Latin alphabets (which would work for the latter two)
simply don't have Cyrillic glyphs (which Bulgarian uses, as does
Russian). For the Bulgarian text, you want to see the list of 20 fonts
which cover the Cyrillic alphabet, not the 100 fonts which cover the
Latin alphabet (and hopefully also

Doing this is not just a UI challenge; it also involves a bit of a
technical challenge: We will have some not-entirely-trivial heuristics
for deciding whether a typeface passes muster as "covering" a written
language, or not. We don't want to have to recompute this again and
again, so there's the question of when and how much of it to precompute;
whether to persist the precomputed information; when to update it etc.

Eyal

PS - Thanks Heiko for bringing it up for discussion and everyone who has
commented already. Special thanks to Jonathan for helping me realize
that "coverage" is a more complex question for CJK languages because of
the situation with ideograms which I've not gotten into here.


  [1]: That is actually a problem in itself; see
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162331 and
  [2]: The same typeface can be associated with multiple language groups
of course.
  [3]: LO's idea of what language you want to use is not always correct,
but that's a different matter. Also, at least in Format > Character...
you literally choose the language you're interested in.



On 25/09/2024 22:46, Heiko Tietze wrote:
> Present: Sahil, Lorenz, John, Heiko
> Comments: Regina, Stuart, Manu, Roman, Laurent, Regina
>
> Tickets/Topics
>
>   * Want access from borders toolbar menubutton to Format > Cells...
>     Borders pane
>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162967
>     + valid request, similar to many other places (Regina, Stuart, Eyal)
>     + toolbar buttons should be simple and provide quick and easy
>       access (Heiko)
>     + could be done similar to Underline (Sahil)
>     + Ribbon always offer access to more properties (Eyal)
>     => go it (consider Border Style as well)
>
>   * Need way to avoid selecting fonts which don't cover the relevant
>     language Unicode range
>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151122
>     + comment 32: add a filter to the special character dialog
>     + rather use/improve the Special Characters dialog or
>       maybe extend the SCD with a font filter (Stuart)
>       + such a filter could be added to the font tab (Heiko)
>       + it is not the request; would not give an immediate understanding
> (Eyal)
>       + unicode blocks not necessarily cover some font, eg. Farsi
>         or diacritics in general (Eyal)
>     + make live preview as known from Calc available in Writer (Manu)
>       + could be done as a checkbox "[ ] Fonts covering the selection" in
>         the character dialog (Heiko)
>       + selection is not always present (Eyal)
>       + would be actually against the use case of "I want to write a
> text in
>         some language and don't know the right font" since text has been
>         written in this case (Heiko)
>     + proposing (Eyal)
>       1. map languages to glyphs like English A:Z, German A:Z,ß,
>          Arabic <aleph><zeta>
>       2. when a language is used (UI, document, etc) the list of fonts
> is tagged
>          as appropriate; and fonts are indicated (could be done by dimming)
>          or filtered (prefer a filter)
>       3. doubt hat filtering covers the use case (Heiko); corner cases
> such as
>          multi-selections for later (Eyal)
>     + expertise from local communities needed (John, Sahil, Lorenz)
>     => continue the discussion on the ticket
>
>   * Reworked localized Impress templates look ugly in RU
>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162878
>     -> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163116
>     + patches fix most issues except Freshes - c14, c16 (Roman, Laurent)
>     + alternative could be some generic text like Alpha Beta...
>       or we delete the example slide completely (Heiko)
>     + but actually would keep it (Heiko)
>     + localized "Some Text 1", "Some Text 2" (Sahil)
>       or without the text (Lorenz)
>     + localization to RTL would still be silly (Eyal)
>     + some people may even not be able to read the letters (Eyal)
>     + morse alphabet... ;-) (Sahil)
>     + we could ship localized templates (Sahil)
>     => keep as it is for now (aka WF)
>
>   * New layouts for LO Impress
>     + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93087
>     + Handout and Notes suggestions seem useful (Stuart)
>     + rather make it customizable, bug 78156 (Regina)
>       + customization on top would be great but some good defaults
>         are needed anyway
>     + before/after needed to decide (Eyal)
>     + no harm in adding more layouts (John)
>     => proposals are fine and implementation is welcome